Lee Falk and The Phantom

digresssmlOriginally published April 9, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1325

Lee Falk never told me to my face how much he disliked my work on The Phantom, and for that I will always be grateful.

My association with the character, and my relatively brief tenure of working with Mr. Falk, began towards the end of my “day job” at Marvel Comics. I’d reached a point where it seemed as if becoming a full-time writer actually seemed an option. But I was aware of the adage about putting all of one’s eggs into one basket. In other words, I wasn’t sanguine about the concept of counting on Marvel as my sole source of comic book income. I figured, what if, y’know, a decade down the road, they get bored with me? Could happen.

However, since I was still Marvel’s direct sales manager, it would have been wholly inappropriate for me to solicit work from DC. It would not have been ethical for me to ask them for an assignment while still connected to Marvel in an office capacity, nor would it have been ethical for me to accept such an assignment for the same reason. But I had too much riding on the decision to become a full time freelancer. I was the primary means of support for a family of four (the Feinblatts, a very nice family of four in upstate Vermont whom I support for no particular reason), to say nothing of my own family of four (at the time.) I didn’t want to make a mistake.

So I decided to feel out DC in an unofficial capacity.

I contacted Bob Greenberger, a long-time friend who was an editor at DC. Because of our history which pre-dated either of us working for comic book companies, I knew I could speak with him in an off-the-record, unofficial capacity. I said, “Understand something: I’m not looking for any offers here, for obvious reasons. However, if I decided to go freelance as a writer, in your opinion, do you think that DC would be interested in tossing any assignments my way.” I figured that was safe enough without violating any ethical considerations. There was, after all, nothing unethical about posing a hypothetical.

“Absolutely, I think there would be a good deal of interest,” Bob replied. “Let me do some checking around.” He then called me back and said that then-editor Mike Gold was interested in getting together to do lunch. Nothing wrong with that, either. As long as Mike didn’t offer me anything and I didn’t accept, my hands were clean. It was walking a fine line, but I looked at it this way: If I were sitting in the fuselage of an airplane with my parachute, and I was checking over every inch of the parachute to make sure that the thing would open once I jumped, that wasn’t the same as actually jumping.

So we got together for lunch (an act which, in and of itself, was hardly untoward). And Mike told me that DC had lined up the rights to do The Phantom as a four-issue limited series. Mike, of course, knew the ethical considerations at stake as well, and he phrased the matter just right. He said, “Now we haven’t got a writer assigned to it yet. I’ve considered a few people. There’s one person in particular who I think would really be right for it… but he’s not available… at the moment. If, of course, that person becomes available, then he’s definitely got the assignment as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to be making any final decision for a few weeks, however. No rush. I can wait to see what happens.”

That was, of course, all I needed to hear. I figured that once I had an in with DC on a creative basis, that I would be in a fairly tenable position so that, in the event I did wind up unable to write Incredible Hulk anymore, I might be able to land work at DC writing books about a version of Supergirl or a team of teen sidekicks, none of whom yet existed. Yes, that’s right: I was just that foresighted.

So, in a way, it was the Phantom who was partly responsible for my becoming a full-time writer. Because if I hadn’t known that series was going to be available… and if there hadn’t been a tacit understanding that it was going to be offered to me should I come “into play,” as it were… then I don’t know that I would have had the nerve to take the plunge and quit my day job.

On that basis, if nothing else, I was tremendously indebted to Mr. Falk. And I did everything I could to be as respectful and attentive to what he wanted for the series.

I didn’t have the opportunity to get together with him during the actual plotting stage, which might have helped to forestall subsequent problems. I had read the Phantom strip as a kid, but hadn’t seen it for some years. So to fresh myself and prep for the series, I did read some of the Phantom novels, which carried his name alone on the front but which, in fact, were collaborations with ghost writers who were acknowledged within the books themselves. (Ghost writers. How appropriate. Perhaps Ron Goulart is the genuine Ghost-Who-Walks.). I also learned that Mr. Falk had initially intended to maintain that tradition, believing that the comic book would only bear his name. Understandable: that was how it was done back when the Phantom had had his previous incarnation in Charlton Comics. DC, however, made clear to him that that wasn’t how it was done anymore.

Since it was four issues and I therefore had some pages to play with, I decided to develop parallel storylines, one which would feature the current incarnation of the Phantom (the 21st of the line) and a second story that would show one of the earlier generation’s Phantoms in his own swashbuckling adventure. The artist was, after all, going to be Joe Orlando, and having Orlando on the strip without giving him the opportunity to do pirates would have been nothing short of criminal.

There are only two experiences of my early career that I would genuinely describe as “heady.” One of them was writing an issue of Spider-Man which featured a framing sequence that was penciled by John Buscema and inked by John Romita, Sr. Two of my artistic idols collaborating on something I’d written; working in comics just didn’t get better than that. And the other was my involvement with the Phantom. Being involved with such a seminal character, one whose origin was so simple and yet so unique, being drawn by a true great such as Orlando, and being entrusted with this wonderful creation by no less than Lee Falk, whose unbroken run on writing the strip may very well be the single longest daily gig in history. It meant a lot to me.

And what happened? I screwed up.

Because I wrote a sequence wherein the Phantom yanked out his guns and shot-to-wound. He didn’t shoot to kill; that simply wasn’t the Phantom. But I thought absolutely nothing of having him wing some bad guys.

But that annoyed Mr. Falk, because as far as he was concerned, the Phantom only shot guns out of people’s hands. Never mind that, in reality, such an action would likely have far greater negative consequences. The Phantom’s bullet could mangle the guy’s hand, doing permanent damage. Or it might ricochet off the solid metal of the gun, either striking the bad guy in a more lethal area or even injuring innocent bystanders. If the hammer was cocked and the gun struck out of the hand, the gun could still go off. I, being too rooted in the real world, just figured that incapacitating the baddies by shooting-to-wound was what the Phantom would logically do. Hëll, I hadn’t given him the guns. They were there. I figured, hëll, let’s use ’em.

Nonetheless, if anyone had told me ahead of time that Mr. Falk wanted it otherwise, I would have done it in a heartbeat. Because he was Lee Falk, that’s why. His character. His concept. His rules. Not a problem. But nobody told me, and apparently no one ran it past him in the plot stages, and consequently he hated the final product because the Phantom wasn’t shooting guns out of people’s hands.

But I wouldn’t have known it—in fact, didn’t know it—when I finally got to meet Mr. Falk. He greeted me politely, seemed genuinely happy to meet me, and he autographed the original artwork for the cover of the first issue which I’d gotten from Joe Orlando, inscribing, “To Peter, Mit luv, Lee Falk, 1988.”) Joe Orlando signed it, too. It’s one of my prize possessions. (Dave Gibbons inked the cover. I should really have him sign it as well).

The thing was, at that point Lee Falk was 76 years old, and the creator of one of the best known characters in the world. One of the earliest and longest-lasting of the superheroes. I was a nobody whom he felt had screwed up a critical element of his baby. He would have been entirely within his rights to tell me exactly what he thought. But he saw how gosh-wow excited I was to meet him, and he was nothing but nice to me, because he knew that if he told me that he felt I’d gotten the Phantom wrong, I would have been crushed. They could have scraped my remains up with a spatula. As much as I loved the Phantom as a kid, as much as I am indebted to the character’s existence for helping spur me to going full time as a writer, it may be that moment—when Lee Falk treated me with simple, common courtesy, something that seems less common these days—that I owe him the most for.

So thank you, Mr. Falk. Mit luv.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He wonders why the Phantom’s lengthy tenure hasn’t resulted in some potentially kick-ášš team-up projects. The Phantom and Zorro. The Phantom and Sherlock Holmes. The Phantom and the Scarlet Pimpernel. The Phantom and Alan Quartermain. The Phantom and Captain Blood. Or my personal dream concept: The Phantom and Tarzan. Rumble in the jungle, anyone?)

 

7 comments on “Lee Falk and The Phantom

  1. Just about every time mentioned in the italicized paragraph at the end could be published by Dynamite today. Heck, I think one or two of them already have…

    It’s never too late, PAD!

  2. Sounds like Mr. Falk was a true class act. So many creators rage whenever someone takes their creations in a different direction (to say nothing of the fans).

    People have some strange ideas about disarming people with guns. I remember a few years ago in Toronto a man took a woman hostage at Union Station and the police had to take him out with a kill shot. People were up in arms (figuratively) that the sniper had not done some dramatic trick shot to blast the gun out of the assailant’s hand. Never mind the fact that he had a barrel pointed at her temple at the time. Hollywood and comics really do inform our views about gun use.

    1. Not just guns.

      Pray you’re never trapped in a car that has a tiny fire burning under the hood; Good Samaritans may very well hurt you worse than the wreck ever did – or even kill you – trying to get you out before it explodes, as thousands upon thousands of Hollywood films have tught them it inevitably will.

      Except that cars don’t explode.

      Hollywood portrays guns as both more and less deadly than they actually are – often in the same film; the guy who is knocked back six yards/off his feet by a 9mm round in the shoulder jumps back up and fights the other guy as if it’s just a scratch…

      1. Cars don’t just explode. Everyone knows that. You have to shoot one to get it to explode. Well, unless the plot requires the characters to take cover behind the car. In that case, you can fill the thing with 20,000 rounds and it’ll just sit there.

      2. Unless of course it’s more dramatic that when one of the characters taking cover behind it suddenly realizes he’s been shot through the car and didn’t realize it.

      3. The “Mythbusters” crew devoted a big chunk of an episode to Hollywood myths regarding guns and cars. Not only were they unable to get their target car to explode with any of the various types of ammo they fired directly into the gas tank, they were also unable to crack the engine block with increasingly larger-caliber ammo.
        And remembering that reminded me of something I recently saw in a commercial for 2 Guns: The protagonists are walking away from a vintage convertible (’64 Chevy Impala, if I recall correctly) in slow motion, when one of them tosses a hand grenade back over his shoulder at the car. Because of the slo-mo, you can see the car blow up before the grenade has landed in it.

  3. “(Dave Gibbons inked the cover. I should really have him sign it as well).”

    So, PAD. Have you done this yet? Inquiring minds want to know.

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